Vincent Vega
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
No, because if they were innocent of the crime they wouldn't have been convicted and sentenced to death.
I say again......that can't happen today with today's DNA and forensic technology.
I'm a devout fan of real crime shows on TV (like "Crime stories", "Medical detectives" etc.) and the percentage of accuracy in convictions due to forensic technology is astounding. There is no way that a person can be convicted of a crime if he didn't do it.
Well, it is not correct, repeating doesn't make it more correct. TV shows hardly ever show you the cases in which no one could get caught, or where the person was later found to be innocent. So the picture they present is naturally skewed in favour of forensics.
In the US, it takes a couple decades from conviction to execution. To cite "today's forensics" such is fallible.
As you state yourself, "the percentage of accuracy in convictions due to forensic technology is astounding", so without recognizing you acknowledge there to be failure. Failure means, you pull the plug on an innocent person.
Science is never 100%. The best science can achieve is to "fail to reject the null hypothesis", meaning you cannot prove what you are trying to find is false or true. Anyone in science claiming to have proven our found something is dishonest to his profession. Forensics is a science.
Just two years ago, it was discovered that German police was searching for a phantom. They found DNA at a number of crime scenes, usually where murders happened, and were looking for a mid-aged woman. After years it came out that the q-tips used were contaminated with the DNA of a woman who worked at the factory producing the q-tips. This is just one example, but there could be plenty of reason why DNA gets found at the scene but does not lead you to the real perpetrator.
There's a number of studies on the "CSI effect", maybe you want to read up on that. Such crime shows, and of course the real ones or such that claim to be real, create a false image of forensics.
And well, your personal feelings of revenge and tremendous emotional involvement in such cases goes diametrically to the philosophy and purpose of the modern legal system.
Hi BVS,
I read the article and the exerpt below proves my point:
half of the 873 exonerations studied in detail, the most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Forty-three percent of the cases involved mistaken eyewitness identification, and 24 percent of the cases involved false or misleading forensic evidence.
In two out of three homicides, perjury or false accusation was the most common factor leading to false conviction. In four out of five sexual assaults, mistaken eyewitness identification was the leading cause of false conviction.
If I met a person and we touched each other, that person would have my DNA on them. If this person got killed shortly after I left, that means I'm the murderer because my DNA is on the body, in the clothing or somewhere on the scene?
DNA doesn't lie and physical evidence doesn't lie either - witnesses can be mistaken and evidence can be falsified, but a murderer's DNA on a victim is a slam-dunk - you cannot falsify DNA evidence.
If I met a person and we talked and touched, this person would have my DNA on them, and I would have theirs. It doesn't even take minutes for that. So if said person had my DNA on them, and shortly after I left he or she got murdered, I would be the murderer?
http://dna-view.com/profile.htm
Some more information on DNA. DNA is quite a good indicator, but no more.